I wonder what especial sanctity attaches itself to fifteen minutes. It is always the maximum and the minimum of time which will enable us to acquire languages, etiquette, personality, oratory ... One gathers that twelve minutes a day would be hopelessly inadequate, and twenty minutes a wasteful and ridiculous excess.

Agnes Repplier

Categorized in : Personality Twenties Learning

It is not easy to find happiness in ourselves, and it is not possible to find it elsewhere.

Agnes Repplier

women happy happiness

He is your friend, your partner, your defender, your dog. You are his life, his love, his leader. He will be yours, faithful and true, to the last beat of his heart. You owe it to him to be worthy of such devotion.

Agnes Repplier

dog heart animal

America has invested her religion as well as her morality in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed; and her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.

Agnes Repplier

blessed america son

It takes time and trouble to persuade ourselves that the things we want to do are the things we ought to do.

Agnes Repplier

choices trouble want

It has been wisely said that we cannot really love anybody at whom we never laugh.

Agnes Repplier

said love laughing

What monstrous absurdities and paradoxes have resisted whole batteries of serious arguments, and then crumbled swiftly into dust before the ringing death-knell of a laugh!

Agnes Repplier

laughter dust laughing

People who pin their faith to a catchword never feel the necessity of understanding anything.

Agnes Repplier

pins understanding people

I am eighty years old. There seems to be nothing to add to this statement. I have reached the age of undecorated facts - facts that refuse to be softened by sentiment, or confused by nobility of phrase.

Agnes Repplier

confused age years

If we could make up our minds to spare our friends all details of ill health, of money losses, of domestic annoyances, of altercations, of committee work, of grievances, provocations, and anxieties, we should sin less against the world's good-humor. It may not be given us to add to the treasury of mirth; but there is considerable merit in not robbing it.

Agnes Repplier

ill-health anxiety loss

The cure-alls of the present day are infinitely various and infinitely obliging. Applied psychology, autosuggestion, and royal roads to learning or to wealth are urged upon us by kindly, if not altogether disinterested, reformers. Simple and easy systems for the dissolution of discord and strife; simple and easy systems for the development of personality and power. Booklets of counsel on 'How to Get What We Want,' which is impossible; booklets on 'Visualization,' warranted to make us want what we get, which is ignoble.

Agnes Repplier

simple personality thinking

It is because of our unassailable enthusiasm, our profound reverence for education, that we habitually demand of it the impossible. The teacher is expected to perform a choice and varied series of miracles.

Agnes Repplier

choices teacher profound

For my part, the good novel of character is the novel I can always pick up; but the good novel of incident is the novel I can never lay down.

Agnes Repplier

incidents reading character

No man pursues what he has at hand. No man recognizes the need of pursuit until that which he desires has escaped him.

Agnes Repplier

desire men hands

Why do so many ingenious theorists give fresh reasons every year for the decline of letter writing, and why do they assume, in derision of suffering humanity, that it has declined? They lament the lack of leisure, the lack of sentiment ... They talk of telegrams, and telephones, and postal cards, as if any discovery of science, any device of civilization, could eradicate from the human heart that passion for self-expression which is the impelling force of letters.

Agnes Repplier

passion heart writing

I am seventy years old, a gray age weighted with uncompromising biblical allusions. It ought to have a gray outlook, but it hasn't, because a glint of dazzling sunshine is dancing merrily ahead of me.

Agnes Repplier

sunshine biblical years

Neatness of phrase is so closely akin to wit that it is often accepted as its substitute.

Agnes Repplier

accepted phrases speech

For indeed all that we think so new to-day has been acted over and over again, a shifting comedy, by the women of every century.

Agnes Repplier

shifting comedy thinking

A real dog, beloved and therefore pampered by his mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He suffers from fatty degeneration of his moral being.

Agnes Repplier

real suffering dog

abroad it is our habit to regard all other travelers in the light of personal and unpardonable grievances. They are intruders into our chosen realms of pleasure, they jar upon our sensibilities, they lessen our meager share of comforts, they are everywhere in our way, they are always an unnecessary feature in the landscape.

Agnes Repplier

landscape light travel

The essence of humor is that it should be unexpected, that it should embody an element of surprise, that it should startle us out of that reasonable gravity which, after all, must be our habitual frame of mind.

Agnes Repplier

humor essence mind